Colourful Chemicals

By: Anke Engelmann

Bright textiles in India

Cotton Textile Production and its Impact in India

Anyone who has been to India will remember the bright colours. And the dirt. Everywhere you look there are stinking rivers, smog, mountains of trash and chemical waste that gets dumped unfiltered into the ground water.  This is the other side of the phenomenal growth that has helped the country in its efforts to catch up to western industrial nations.  This ambivalence can be seen in most of the textiles that are exported from India. High street bargains are usually cheaply produced with a huge amount of chemicals.  Genetically modified, drenched in pesticides and dyed in toxic colours, they destroy the environment and the lives of cotton growing farmers. Cheap clothes have their price.

India is the second biggest cotton growing country in the world, after China and before the US.  Large multinationals have established themselves there with the support of the Indian government.  The largest seed producer in India, the US company Monsanto, is well known in the UK for their genetically modified corn, MON810.  The German company Bayer-AG is one of the biggest sellers of pesticides and insecticides in India and worldwide.

2002 marked the beginning of the genetically modified cotton production in India, when the Monsanto cotton “Bollgard” was permitted.  This cotton is supposed to be made resistant to harmful insects by the addition of the protein Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt).  Many Indian cotton farmers who could barely survive growing traditional cotton varieties switched over to using the new monoculture, the “high performance” cotton.  The aggressively marketed Bt variety is now very widespread.  There are 4 million Indian cotton farmers currently using this genetically manipulated plant on over 7 million hectares of land. That is 76 percent of the entire cotton growing areas.

And yet the much hoped for success did not come for the small cotton farmers in India.  Each step they took away from their traditional methods made them more dependent on seed dealers and pesticide companies. Many of the farmers are now in deep debt. This debt seems to be one of the reasons that over 500 farmers committed suicide in the years 1997-1998, reported by various NGOs.  Monsanto disagrees with the connection to their products and says the that there were complex social economic factors involved. The use of  “Bollgard”  cotton has had other significant effects for the Indian environment and farming.  For example, the insects have developed a resistance to the genetically modified plant, so that again large amounts of pesticides must be used.  Now there is a new generation of cotton products on the market, with two variations on the Bt protein.  But Bt also is harmful to the useful insects in the fields as well.

The companies involved do their best to maintain a good image.  In 2005 it became known that most Indian cotton farms employ large numbers of children. Bayer started a major publicity campaign in the cotton growing area of Andrha Pradesh .  Today, years later, many NGOs still criticize that the corporations Monsanto and Bayer have still not done enough to solve the problems. Even the school programs financed by these companies do not seem to have been very effective or well established locally.

The winner of the conventional cotton production in India is clearly the large multinational corporations, according to the report by the NABU.  And yet there is a growing demand for sustainable, ecologically produced, organically grown  and fair traded textiles.  This demand makes it possible for some cooperatives in India to offer a real alternative to the chemical giants, and at the same time gives small farmers a way that they can make a living.